Sunday, November 30, 2014

Natalie Bennett, Leader of the Green Party in England & Wales
(& Cornwall)
was one of the panel on BBC Radio 4’s Any
Questions? this week.To the
amazement of anyone concerned about the ecological crisis we face, she launched
into an impassioned defence of massive urban development and a rejection of those measures that might keep population growth within locally acceptable bounds.

So, what’s the Green Party for?Why does it pretend to be part of the
solution when it clearly has the same analysis of the problem as all the other
London-based parties?Namely that the
damage done by growth is to be cured by yet more growth.It has over recent years courted the
red-green vote, by playing up the red, but seemingly at the expense of the
green.

All parties are constantly challenged to say what they would
do to create more jobs.A really
courageous party would challenge the question.We don’t need the maximum number of jobs.We need the optimum number of jobs for the
optimum size of population, given the sensible limits that define our region’s
place in a sustainable world.The UK has far, far
too many jobs for its size, many of them in the wrong places and many of them
financially profitable (for others) but socially useless and environmentally harmful.That’s one reason why it’s importing folk at
the rate of 250,000 a year net.It also
has a failed education and welfare system, because it has 2 million unemployed
who should be matched to the jobs available and trained to do them if they lack
the skills.Come on, this isn’t rocket
science, it’s the basic sustainability that corporate interests prevent us enjoying.

Growth isn’t necessary for economic reasons.It’s necessary only for fiscal reasons,
because without it the UK
cannot pay the interest on the imaginary debts it’s been fooled by bankers into
believing that it owes.The continued
refusal to confront this fact is what’s leading to planet-wide disaster as rising
debt outstrips the capacity of the real, resource-limited economy.

Friday, November 28, 2014

In Nineteen Eighty-Four,
Orwell painted a picture of the future as a boot stamping on a human face,
forever.The boot now has a name.TTIP.The Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership.Hammered out in secret talks between Europe
and the USA,
it will make democracy illegal, by giving corporations the right to sue
governments for passing laws that restrict their profits, such as laws that
raise environmental or social protection.

Campaign group 38 Degrees gave evidence this week to a
select committee at Westminster.One of their members described the experience
as follows:

“This week I was
shouted at by a group of MPs.

I'd been asked to
explain to the Business Select Committee why 38 Degrees members are so worried
about TTIP.That's the dodgy EU-US trade
deal that could bring further privatisation of our NHS.But once I got there, they didn’t seem to
want to hear why we were against privatisation.Or why we want to stop American corporations having the power to sue our
government in secret courts.

Instead they attacked
38 Degrees members for wanting to have a say.They kept arguing that 38 Degrees members didn’t know enough to have
valid opinions about the deal.And when
I said we don’t trust politicians to deal with something as important as this
behind closed doors, the chairman told me to shut up!”

If, like us, you’re sceptical about the value of trade and
concerned about the threat that trade poses to democracy, you’ll understand
where he’s coming from.TTIP has to be
defeated but, in the long term, it’s just as important to defeat the mindset –
totalitarian liberalism – that thinks something like TTIP could ever be
acceptable in a society that values vital democracy.We’ve become numbed to the idea that it’s not
for business to compete for access to our markets, it’s for nations to compete
for the privilege of investment by businesses.Because if the businesses are disobeyed, they have the power (that we
gave to them) to lay waste to everything.Faced with the threat of our sovereignty now being for sale, defence is
nowhere near enough.Politics must
re-conquer economics or go down fighting. A boycott of US goods might be a start?

It’s just a shame that David Babbs – the man who now
complains about being shouted at – is the man who decided only last year that the
voters of Eastleigh ought not to hear from
Colin Bex.

Here’s a story from the North
Somerset Times, a story with outlines applicable throughout Wessex, and
maybe across other regions too:

“A long-standing
member of North Somerset’s Conservative party
has resigned from the organisation which he believes ‘has no interest’ in the
area’s issues.

Arthur Terry, who
is the representative for Portishead’s East Ward on North Somerset Council, has
left the party and will continue his work for residents as an independent
councillor.

Cllr Terry has been
a Tory party member since 1981 and was elected to Woodspring Council [as North Somerset
Council was then known] in 1984.

He cites issues
including police funding and new housing figure demands as reasons for leaving
the Conservatives.

He said: ‘Over the
years it has become increasingly clear to me that the national political
parties of all persuasions have no interest in this area.

‘This is demonstrated
by their repeated failure to address the serious inequities in the distribution
of the revenue support grant to our local authorities and it would appear the
consistent failure of our local Members of Parliament to influence this.

‘Clearly as a lone
voice I can do little to influence these issues, but I can be honest and no
longer represent a party that has no interest in the views and concerns of
ordinary members.’

Comment is barely necessary.Centralist diktat steamrollers on, oblivious to promises of localism.Unfair funding arrangements continue.Protests to those at the top of the
London-based parties go unheeded.Experienced local
councillors draw their own conclusions, and so we see the centuries of
deference to London
dominance slowly start to wither and die at the root.

On 9th November 2014, Catalonia voted 4
to 1 for independence from Spain.Madrid isn’t ready to begin talks on
separation.Instead, it’s determined to prosecute
Catalonia’s leading nationalists for organising the vote. Will David Cameron protest?Will there be airstrikes?

On 20th November 2014, the French Parliament voted to abolish many of
the historic regions of France through forced mergers, against the wishes of
those affected.An amendment calling for
the reunification of Brittany – split since the Vichy era between two regions,
one predominantly non-Breton – was haughtily rejected.Will David Cameron protest?Will there be airstrikes?

In both these states, the full force of the law is being used to crush democratic
feeling.All in defence of the outdated
primacy of ‘France’ and ‘Spain’, and of the power of centralist politicians to glorify
a long-dead past and view other, more human-scale loyalties as a threat.This is what happens when the Europe of a
Hundred Flags steps up from bookish theory to impassioned practice.There are those who really don’t like the
idea one bit.Warmongers,
austerity-merchants and lovers of technocracy.David Cameron is among them, so watch this space.

Let’s step back to 14th November for an insight into the true depth of
establishment paranoia.Cornelius Adebahr’s
article for the Carnegie Endowment explores the problems facing a fragmenting
Europe, from the perspective that fragmentation is somehow a ‘bad thing’.Xenophobic hatred certainly is, but that
isn’t the subject matter of debate among Europeans seeking greater
autonomy.All we want is genuine
subsidiarity free from centralist manipulation.

Including the power to judge for ourselves what functions we’re capable
of exercising.Europe is in crisis
because it has become a project of elite dominance, the preserve of a
managerialist class that denies the right – or even the ability – of ordinary folk
to shape their own governance.Adebahr
sneers at what he terms ‘populism’ because it’s too democratic.He sneers at nationalism because it isn’t
driven by a narrowly economic conception of rationality.Because it rejects that ‘rationality’ in
which economic power rests not with democratic states but with anonymous global
‘investors’ shopping around for the choicest bargain.

The Europe of the Investors is an integrated economic space in which
barriers to the movement of capital do not exist and democratic ownership of key
economic assets is repeatedly eroded.Together, these two things make it easy for markets to punish
policy-makers who dare to be different. (UK governments make things more
than usually hard for themselves – and for us – for contorted ideological
reasons that stem from City overlordship of our political system.)Populism is labelled as bad
because it’s the opposite of what we might call investism.TTIP and the Lisbon Treaty are part of the
process of declaring democracy illegal worldwide because it cannot be
guaranteed to put investor interests first.And we now see in France and Spain on which side of the argument
nationalists and regionalists are judged to stand.Voting is the way to change everything, or it
is nothing.OK, nothing it is then.

We’ve made clear our own view that vital industries, utilities and
public services must be owned and controlled locally and regionally – not
bought and sold by the multi-nationals.Common ownership is a widely held ideal, even among Conservatives.The consensus now needs to be put into
effect.Obviously, not through Labour
or its continental equivalents, all tainted beyond recognition, but through
radical nationalist and regionalist alternatives.

How radical?Should compensation
be paid to the present owners?And if
so, how much?If the aim is to achieve
common ownership, in the public
interest, can the private (or foreign
public) interests represented by compensation claims be viewed as anything but self-centred
trivia, irrelevant to the core issue of achieving economic democracy?Or should those who invested in good faith be
reimbursed, it being no fault of theirs if they sank money into a politically
sensitive industry?In short, is the
current set-up a crime against society or just a mistake?Have the investment giants earned our rage or
our pity?

Any such theories of ‘fairness’ can be laboured so as to slow down necessary
progress.Even to visualise the issue as
a transaction is to bow to a hostile point of view.Why not decouple progress from that which
retards it?Why not take back now, and
pay back later (if at all)? Our thinking has been so polluted by investism – even governments claim to be 'investing' in roads or a better NHS when what they mean is they're devoting more resources to transport or healthcare – that we miss the most obvious, direct answers to our problems. Cut the Gordian knot. Or perhaps, in the case of PFI, the Gordon knot.

Bear in mind (a) that many of our nationalised industries were created by
seizing municipal assets without compensation (and this sort of thing still
goes on, quite shamelessly), (b) that they were then privatised at an average 30%
discount on the market price, (c) that as natural monopolies they have
continued to be cash cows ever since, and (d) that corporations spent – and spend
– millions on subverting the democratic debate, belying the idea that they
exist only to serve.False title.False value.False benefit.False intent.It would be entirely reasonable to conclude
that the owners are worth rather less to us than they claim. Moreover, the owners aren't the ones who know how to run buses, trains, power plants or treatment works in Wessex. Their only expertise is in financial engineering, which any sane society would be better off without. So how do we value their contribution? On balance, negatively. THEY should be paying US. At the very least, let's start the negotiations at nil and work upwards EVER so reluctantly. We can't increase taxes or borrowing, so the third option it has to be.

What we need is not so much ‘UK plc’ as ‘Wessex Common Estate’, our
resources managed for this and for future generations.Public assets belong to everyone, born and
unborn, and should only ever be leased, never sold, let alone given away.We need a politics of stewardship, not a
politics of trading.Friends are
motivated by love to share, willingly, within the restraints of a common bond. Enemies are motivated by fear to trade,
suspiciously, without the restraints of a common bond.It’s true for us, it’s true for Europe, and
it’s true for the world.You share with
your friends and you trade with your enemies.What does that say about those who want global trade to grow?

Europe stands at a crossroads.A
second Berlin Wall can come tumbling down, destroying the needless political
centralism of old global empires AND, if the will is there, the needless economic
centralism of new global corporations too.These are two causes that can make common cause in delivering what folk
clearly want to see happen. Either that, or the
military will be on the streets to make sure it doesn’t happen.That’s how scared the bullies are.

Saturday, November 15, 2014

Thanks to the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 we know that the next
General Election will be on 7th May 2015.This means that small parties with few resources and little flexibility
now have the same chance to plan ahead as the London-based big battalions with
their ear to the ground at Westminster.

WR President Colin Bex and Secretary-General David Robins were in
Bridgwater today, in one of the Party’s possible target seats.Bridgwater is a much under-rated place, proud
of its past and with good reason but, as a working-class town hit by plant
closures, also one concerned about its future.There were some cracking good conversations to be had on the main
shopping streets, and real interest in an alternative to the status quo.Colin was being shadowed by an independent film production company
looking to follow him throughout the campaign.Along with the flag, they proved to be a valuable visual prompt to
passing members of the public to stop and talk.

After Bridgwater, Colin travelled on to Truro for the Mebyon Kernow Annual
Conference, an event WR members try to attend whenever possible. With the Cornish now
recognised as a national minority and the campaign for a Cornish Assembly again
making waves, it can only be a matter of time before those in the English
regions look closely at their Celtic neighbours and start to ask why they can’t
have some of that new politics too. Our power. Our wealth. Let's have them back.

Friday, November 7, 2014

The Scots recently held a referendum on independence.They discussed what currency to use, whether
to join NATO, and what to do about Trident.

BBC West’s televised debate on devolution this week took a different
approach.At one point, the politicians
on the panel were challenged with the problem of different wheelie bins on
opposite sides of the same street in Kingswood, on the Bristol fringe.It’s a common enough phenomenon on the
boundaries between London
boroughs but Londoners have other things to get excited about.Like what to spend our taxes on next.

Anyone watching from Dorset or Wiltshire must have been deeply
disappointed that Bristol
hogged the limelight.It wasn’t even as
if the politicians were that well-informed.South Gloucestershire’s Leader went on about the 1,000-year-old county
boundaries, unaware that Bristol’s
boundary with its rural neighbours dates from 1951.A long time ago now, but not before the
Norman Conquest.

What this clearly wasn’t was a debate on devolution.Not until the very end, when the Wessex
Wyvern was raised and a show of hands sought on whether or not we need the same
powers as Scotland.The ‘No’ vote won, but a surprisingly large
number of hands went up for ‘Yes’, considering that this was a proposition the
programme-makers had largely sought to bury beneath a mantle of municipal
minutiae.

It could have been worse.Viewers
might have been, yet again, denied the knowledge that a regionalist alternative
exists.Viewers elsewhere in Wessex were
indeed denied that knowledge.

There is no regional television channel that serves the whole of Wessex.Its creation has been one of our aims since
1979.Meanwhile, the BBC divides Wessex into the
four sub-regions into which it naturally divides geographically.The north-west is served from Bristol, the south-west from Plymouth,
and the south-east from Southampton.The north-east is served from Southampton
too, via bases in Reading and Oxford.The way these various stations treated the devolution issue varied
enormously, illustrating one of the challenges for a regionalist party whose
aspirations the centre struggles to recognise and accommodate.

BBC West, from the Bristol
Cathedral Choir
School, did as well as could be expected.A range of views was aired, but the Wyvern
was the only splash of colour in an otherwise drab offering.On Twitter, the programme was variously
described as dreadful, dire and dreary, with the limited capabilities of the
superficial Points West format coming
in for criticism.One tweet sums up the
reaction: “I wish I had gone to bed
instead of watching.”

BBC South West, from Cornwall’s Eden
Project, could have had a Wessex
presence too.Their researcher was in
discussions with our President, Colin Bex, in late October but by early
November he’d been dropped from the shortlist.Mebyon Kernow’s Leader, Cllr Dick Cole, put in a sustained effort on the
night but it would have been good to allow viewers east of the Tamar to know
that they too have an alternative to the London-centric status quo.Subsequent tweets suggested that the English
south-west had been badly let down by the programme-makers – but if they will exclude
the one political party that has something specific to say about the English
south-west then you have to expect that.

BBC South, serving the heart of Alfred’s kingdom, was the one station
where you might think a Wessex Regionalist presence would be imperative.Apparently not.The South didn’t even get a programme to
itself, but a joint one with the South East.One of the presenters agonised over whether the area had any coherent sense
of regional identity.Define it like
that and it’s not hard to find the answer.

Now, we know that BBC stations do talk to each other.They share contact details and get each other
to film extra footage or record audio that they can pass around (and they
co-produce the occasional programme, like Late
Kick Off).We hope they go on doing
so.What they seemingly do not do is
share editorial perspective.When The Case for Wessex was launched at
Wantage in 2003, BBC South turned up to film the event.Other BBC stations in Wessex declined
to cover the story at all.Not in their
area.True, Wantage is not, but Wessex
is.

Politicians and media alike share a local perspective that is set within
a national context.Regions perplex
them.Too big to be local.Too small to be national.That’s right.They’re something in between, the missing piece of the jigsaw, the piece
whose absence explains why the governance of Britain is so dysfunctional.Imagining the difference that having them
will make is not easy, though Scotland
and Wales
are there to be visited should you need a model.The benefits will be clear enough once regions
are in place in England.Those benefits will be forever denied us though,
without the ability to see over the hedge.

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

We know where London is, but is the rest
of England also London?It seems that the London regime would like to make it so.

Manchester has a proud
history and a distinctive identity.Or
used to.Yet Greater Manchester
Transport has become ‘Transport for Greater Manchester’, because that’s the
word-order they now use in London.And yesterday, George Osborne announced a Boris
for Greater Manchester, just two years after the city voted down the idea of a
directly elected mayor.The new man or
woman will take control of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, whose
members have surrendered their democratic rights in return for a promise that a
few more crumbs will be devolved to the area.

Apart from Bristol, all the big cities ordered
to vote on having an elected mayor rejected the idea, but Osborne is determined
to roll it out regardless, with Leeds next in
his sights.Osborne’s job, of course, is
to run the Treasury so the fact that he’s now become the expert on local
government structures shows how deep purely financial interests now reach into
the dark heart of policy-making.Or maybe the
minister actually responsible, Yorkshireman Eric Pickles, knows better than to
court controversy on the wrong side of the Pennines.

The Mayor will take over some or all of the role of Police & Crime
Commissioner for Greater Manchester.Perhaps the thinking is that with more to do, he or she might even
motivate voters to turn out, something they won’t do for the PCCs.In last week’s PCC by-election in South Yorkshire, turnout was 15%.In the first round of PCC elections in 2012,
one ballot box in Newport
famously contained not a single paper.Why can’t we just dissolve the people and elect a new one?Where’s the point in offering them anything
when they’re clearly not interested?Oh,
but they are if they’re Scottish.Scotland’s
independence referendum, with an 84.5% turnout, shows that the fault doesn’t lie with the
voters.It lies with those who keep
asking the wrong questions, creating new posts that no-one outside the
London-based think-tanks ever asked for, disrupting local arrangements that were
well understood.Come along now
children, we’re going to the polls today.Shan’t.But you know it’s your
civic duty to sign away your power with the mark of an illiterate. Not going to.

Well, good for them.We’ve always
had a sense of solidarity with those up north who have their whole world
regularly turned upside down by the social vivisectionists in London.Their governance, their economy, their identity, all are things to be
experimented with until the region conforms to London expectations.(Serve them right, you may well say, for
voting for London parties instead of for their own and you’d be correct that
they have less and less excuse now.)So they’ll
be getting a Mayor of Greater Manchester and a Mayor of West Yorkshire.But if all of the recently established
Combined Authorities for the conurbations are now to be turned into
mayoralties, what of Tyneside / Wearside?That’s one area where things are different.

There’s still plenty of talk of creating an Integrated Transport
Authority for Greater Bristol – a new Avon County Council in all but name – and
the idea is unlikely to go away any time soon.The same thinking resurfaces at times like this in South Hampshire.The fact is that it’s yesterday’s
solution.Tyne & Wear had an
Integrated Transport Authority until this year, when it was abolished in favour
of the North East Combined Authority, a wider body taking in the surrounding
counties.If you want better transport,
it has to be better for everyone, not just the cities.It has to be about developing a transport
network, and for that you need a regional perspective.The North East Combined Authority is a step
in that direction, being not much smaller in area than the regional assembly
that voters rejected in 2004, though it lacks direct elections or significant
new powers.

So when Osborne completes his roll-out, will there be a Mayor of the
North East?Where does the nonsense
end?Ed Miliband, not wishing to be
outflanked, is promising powers to arbitrary groupings of shires, to be known
as ‘county regions’.Will they be
getting mayors too?The Mayor of Cornwall & Isles of Scilly?The Mayor of Heart of the South West?With Manchester
Londonised, and Leeds next, is English local
government all doomed to find transparent, deliberative democracy phased out in
favour of an elective dictatorship of personality politicians forming a scrum
round the Treasury’s big ball of money?Rugby is perhaps the wrong analogy.This isn’t Rugby.This is Eton.(Or maybe St Paul’s.)

David Cameron has bought-in to the current fad for
empowering England’s
big cities because it enables any more radical action to be kicked into the
long grass.Shame on Ed Miliband for not
seeing this. It’s a fad however that
deserves to be comprehensively deconstructed:

1.Cameron is not to be trusted on
decentralisation.He promised
‘localism’: an end to Whitehall
interference in local decision-making.Instead he has allowed Whitehall
to obtain new powers to interfere, while making none of the really big changes
that are needed.Whole Whitehall departments such as Communities and
Education have no other significant function but to interfere in local
decision-making.They wouldn’t be
missed.So why the delay in scrapping
them?

2.The ‘cities first’ agenda isn't about
fairness.It degrades the importance of
the lives lived by those of us who are not in the big cities.If cities are trusted to make their own
decisions, why hold back the countryside and small towns?Have they nothing to contribute?Why do they need to be micro-managed from London if others don’t?

3.It will be nice for some to get more powers, but
aren’t these the same powers – or some of them – that have been taken away from
local government over the past 70 years, by Labour efficiency men and Tory ideologues?Don’t the strings attached make any
concessions meaningless?

4.The idea of cities as drivers of economic growth
is flavour of the month.But other
economic geographies are available – like the South Coast Metropole or the M4
Corridor.These are geographies that
transcend local government boundaries but fit naturally within the boundaries
of a Wessex
region.Should radicals even be
welcoming the idea of economic growth anyway?Can we be sure that it’s not just a euphemism for environmental, cultural
and social devastation, here or abroad?Who benefits, besides the bankers?

5.City-regions, whatever their boundaries or
powers, are just a different kind of local government.They're a distraction from the business of
real regionalists, which is to devolve power to the nations and regions of Britain.Cities won’t have assemblies with law-making
powers and exclusive control of the NHS, education policy, regional railways or
the environment.Cities deserve more
power, but so do we all.Regional devolution
is the bold, substantial way to deliver that.

6.Applying extreme surgery to local government in
order to replicate the ‘London
effect’ is missing the point.London is more successful and other cities less so not
because it has an elected mayor but because London houses the UK Government and benefits
from its largesse.A Boris for every big
city is no more than constitutional facadism if that regional concentration of
power and resources is not addressed.A
Boris first, then we might think about devolution, is the kind of insulting,
controlling behaviour that proves London
is not serious about sharing.

The cities agenda is intimately linked to the roll-out of elected mayors.And that's very much
about taking decisions out of the public glare of the council chamber and into
closed rooms where Big Business and Big Government can do deals with the lone, bullyable
individual in whom all power is vested.This isn't about opening up democracy; it's all about shutting it
down.

And it doesn’t matter which party is in power.A ruling-class consensus emerged sometime in
the 1990s that English local government was to be changed over to an American /
continental model, something that had been discussed on the fringes of power
since at least the 1970s.Scotland, Wales
and Northern Ireland,
on the other hand, have no elected mayors, but devolution there provides an
alternative focus for strategic decision-making that arguably makes them
unnecessary.

The collegiate style that has served England well for centuries is an
anomaly.But how to get rid of it?Blair tried the fanfare approach.Choose how to be governed, by demanding a
referendum!Few found the offer
appealing.Cameron / Clegg applied more
pressure.Compulsory referenda, with the
previous right to undo the decision withdrawn.Bristol
apart, it still didn’t work.So Osborne
is sent in to twist the arms of civic leaders until they say that yes, in the
name of our unconsulted electorates, we volunteer to give you everything if
you’ll give us just a little.

There may or may not be a good case for elected mayors but there
probably isn’t.The fact that only calling
in the heavies produces results suggests that the case is not one normally
found compelling.The fact that other
countries do things their way isn’t a convincing argument in itself for
following suit.If it were, then any
comparison with American or continental practice would reveal the existence of
state or regional governments.And where
are they in the Coalition’s harmonisation scheme?The case for following foreign practice in
that respect is much, much stronger than the case for elected mayors.Not least because it would be a fundamental
shift in the location of power, rather than a reshuffling of an existing pack
to reduce transparency and increase the scope for keeping local government on a
tight leash.

Analysis of what’s going on is, sadly, far too easy.Our
politics is built upon the idea that power and money reside in London and that our best chance of seeing
those things used for our benefit is to bow deeply and tug our forelocks
hard.

The London regime has no power but
that which our votes give it. The London regime has no money but
that which our taxes give it.(Even its
stupendous debts would be impossible to run up without a reasonable expectation
of them being honoured at some point.)While we have
no quarrel with the ordinary folk of London,
a new politics, a politics of regional renaissance, must work ceaselessly to
deny it both these things.Because we too,
in all of the regions, have a voice to be heard and a vision of a better life
to be lived.

Monday, November 3, 2014

Media interest continues, BBC Bristol and BBC Wiltshire both seeking
interviews this week.David Garmston
from BBC Points West went to Longleat
to record an interview with our veteran founder, Lord Bath for Sunday Politics West.It took up 3 minutes, 42 seconds of a 1 hour,
10 minute programme filled mainly with much less interesting stuff.(Catch it on iPlayer, at 50:32 in.)

Yesterday saw filming for another BBC programme, More Power to the West?, again fronted by David Garmston, for
broadcast on Guy Fawkes Night.Oddly,
according to the BBC website, this programme and its equivalent for BBC South
West (Cornwall and Devon)
are both 40 minutes long.The BBC South equivalent is 10 minutes long.Is the
attention span of eastern Wessex
really that much shorter than western Wessex?

The format yesterday was a four-person panel – Parliamentarians from the
three main London parties plus George Ferguson, Independent Mayor of Bristol –
with an audience mostly made up of local politicians, businessfolk and experts
of one kind or another.The audience
proved to be a lot more lively than the panel.The three main parties all agree that decentralisation is good, which
begs the question why none of them do a thing about it when in power (other than
to do the opposite while pretending they’re not).No wonder they’re now so widely despised.

From the start it was clear that Wessex at last had a chance of a receptive
airing, David Robins being invited to contribute to the debate and to unfurl
the Wyvern for the cameras.Leanne Wood,
Leader of Plaid Cymru, said it looked like a Welsh dragon.Cue to point out the number of legs (two legs
Wessex, four legs Wales) and that
ours is just as ancient.There’s no
doubt that the Wyvern, with its warm, bold colours and sweeping lines, makes
excellent television and a lasting impression.

A now recurrent theme is the realisation that Wessex
provides a ready-made answer to the question of how to devolve power in our
part of England.An optimist might even say that this is an
idea whose time has come.We don’t need
a Labour-style constitutional convention to hold back implementation any
longer.

A realist – aware of the history of the Celtic countries – is more
likely to take the view that a trans-generational struggle is just beginning.The London
regime has many centuries of experience in how to prevent necessary
change.Yesterday’s debate was a useful step
on the road to change but was memorable mainly for the low aspirations evident
among our region’s elected politicians.Too
bruised by the oppressive system they try to work within, they haven’t the room
to raise their sights.In contrast, we
don’t want negotiation with our London
masters over city deals or combined authorities.We want their rule out of the
region at the point of a pitchfork, never to be allowed back.

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Two common objections to regionalism are that another tier
of government means more politicians and more cost.It needn’t in fact mean either.

First though, let’s be a bit more broad-minded.We need government to be more effective and efficient
– but to achieve that you need to invest, politically in the right people and
financially in the right resources.

More politicians aren’t necessarily a bad thing.Fewer politicians mean fewer ways to
scrutinise government and hold it to account.Over the past 50 years we have seen repeated cuts in the number of local
councillors, in the range of services they oversee and in the power that
ordinary, backbench councillors have to make decisions.So, to sum up, we have less democracy.We have less ability as voters to influence
what public money is spent on.

More cost isn’t necessarily a bad thing.Cost is not the same thing as waste.If we want better services, or even services
no worse than those we have now, then they have to be paid for.But a system of government that pretends it
can reduce costs by centralising decisions is missing something.It is missing the fact that centralised
solutions tend to be standardised solutions that might not be what we need or
want.They will be shaped by what the
centre thinks we should have, and the centre’s thought in turn will be shaped
by lobbies whose outlook we may not share.

Back to the devolution debate.Politicians are looking for easy answers, by
empowering existing local councils, or at worst setting up joint authorities,
or maybe sweeping up all the powers into the hands of a metro-mayoral Caesar
that bankers can trust to do the right thing.But localism, as we have learnt, is a lie.Localities are only being empowered to make
the decisions that the centre would have made anyway if it had had direct
control.And even in theory, there are practical
limits to localism because big, strategic decisions are beyond the capacity of
a fragmented local government system.Councils aren’t going to get powers to re-shape the NHS or the
railways.They aren’t going to be able
to make laws or set income tax rates.Is
the devolution debate in England
a sham, just like localism?

Of course it is, if a new tier of government is ruled out on
ideological grounds.Had that been the
starting point, the Scottish Parliament and the London,
Northern Ireland
and Welsh Assemblies could never have been created.The number that matters isn’t the number of
tiers.It’s the overall cost of
government – and the extent to which government is seen to deliver what it
promises.

Will regionalism mean more politicians?That, ultimately, is a political choice.One way forward is to argue that if
two-thirds of decisions are moved out of Westminster
into regional hands, you then cut the number of MPs by two-thirds to match.Since most Assembly Members would live within
commuting distance of the assembly venue, there’d be none of the nonsense of
flipped second homes in London
necessitated by having a constituency hundreds of miles away.(In a smaller House of Commons, everyone
would get a place to sit down if they turned up for a popular debate, which
isn’t possible today.)

So on to cost.Having a regional assembly will cost us more, won’t it?Here are five reasons why not.It
comes down to political will.A Wessex assembly
is likely to be run by politicians with enough sense not to impose unnecessary
burdens on the electorate and so the savings below are savings they are likely
to make.They are savings that an
assembly government led by the Wessex Regionalist Party would certainly prioritise.

1.Moving government out of London cuts costs

That's why much of the back office work is already done in
places like Wales or Northumbria.Labour and property costs are lower there and
there is very limited need to travel back and forth to London.But devolution means the top jobs have to move out too.Some of the mandarins who currently advise
Ministers in Whitehall will instead be advising
a Wessex
government.These are jobs that command
big salaries.That spending power is
then put into the Wessex
economy, not the London
economy.It’s also worth noting that
savings aren’t confined to the political sphere – the media would also have to
become less London-obsessed and there would be a bigger role for the regional
newsrooms and production centres busy following debates in the regional
assemblies.Lobbyists too would need to
decentralise.

2.Integrating the region manages costs
better

Regional administration already exists.What is missing is regional government.Most government employees do not work in London.The work of government is carried on in the
regions through a tangle of quangos and local offices, all of which could be
rationalised as part of an integrated regional government.Something similar happened in local
government in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the various
Improvement Commissioners, School Boards, Boards of Guardians and the like were
replaced by unified councils levying a unified rate.Integration saves money.The Welsh Government has merged three of its
environmental quangos into one and delegated some of its own powers to it in
order to save £158 million over the first ten years.That’s money that can then be spent on
services or used to reduce taxation.

It’s often said that an assembly will need an expensive new
headquarters.That’s not how public
sector property works.The stock of
public buildings turns over constantly as older buildings are replaced by new
ones with lower running costs.Eventually,
the same money will be spent on new buildings by the UK
as by a Wessex
assembly.

Meanwhile, Wessex
civil servants will go on working in the same places that they worked as UK civil
servants.Assembly meetings can be
rotated around our leading cities if that’s seen as a way to prevent any one of
them fancying itself as a new London.Winchester is
our historic capital, Bristol is our largest
city, Bath
already has its Assembly Rooms.But if
we’re serious about a new, decentralised approach to government then we need to
re-think the whole idea of a capital city.Along the lines of a network that allows all areas to have a share in
the work of governing Wessex.That means departments locating where their
main customers are, or the geographical focus of their work.It means politicians being willing to travel
and able to see things not just from their own constituents’ point of view.

This isn’t revolutionary.Germany and the Netherlands are
two examples of countries where the work of government is shared out.Germany’s
Constitutional Court
is in Karlsruhe, not Berlin – deliberately distanced from the
other institutions of government.The
Dutch capital is Amsterdam but the seat of
government is The Hague; the broadcasting centre
is Hilversum.

3.A democratic region delivers better
value for money

The point of devolution is the power to do things
differently.Not only does regional
administration already exist, so too does a regional budget, even if it’s currently
split between numerous government departments.A Wessex assembly can
see to it that the money is used wisely, setting its own priorities, which may
well differ from those handed down from Whitehall.With law-making powers too, an assembly can
really tailor services to what its area needs.

4.A strong region can defend its budget

When Michael Gove was Education Secretary, he dreamt up a
plan to fund every school in England
directly from Whitehall,
cutting out local education authorities.The bargaining power of a single LEA against the might of Whitehall is
limited.The bargaining power of a
single headteacher is non-existent.Regions
big enough to stand up to Whitehall bullying
will get that money out of London.They will have the resources to commission
their own research to challenge official figures and to brief the media with
it.It will no longer be a one-sided
dialogue.Regions with taxation powers
will be guaranteed a degree of financial freedom from Treasury interference.

Local government services have borne the brunt of austerity,
while the UK State protects its own.The
Welsh Assembly too has seen its finances cut but within its budget it has found
the money to increase local government spending by 3%, at a time when English
local government is looking to cut spending by 7%.Applying the Welsh model to Wessex and other English regions could create a
coalition of opposition to the City-driven priorities of the London regime.

5.A region understands its businesses
better

Far from being a burden on the region’s businesses, a Wessex assembly
would be in a strong position to help them succeed.Its powers would include education and
training, transport, housing, planning, economic development, tourism and the
arts, agriculture, forestry and fisheries.It would be well placed to take on new responsibilities that may emerge
at the regional scale, such as oversight of infrastructure and public
utilities.The more powers that are
devolved, the more incentive the region has to make a success of them because
the more that success will be reflected in the assembly’s own rising revenues.

Businesses that have a hard time convincing BIS or the banks
in London can expect a different reception in Wessex,
especially if they can show how their plans fit with specifically regional
aspirations.A Wessex assembly will be one part of a wider
expression of the Wessex
‘brand’, with tourism in particular benefiting from a more coherent narrative
but with related industries like food & drink and music also potential
beneficiaries.

There are many reasons to be regional, but doom and gloom
are not among them.The small scale,
territorial integration and flexibility of action that come with being a region
are precisely what’s needed to respond to the challenges of the 21st century.

The Torygraph
yesterday reminded us that the Conservatives may be in coalition with the Liberal
Democrats but they are far from being liberal.(Democracy isn’t often their strong point either.)

Theresa May’s proposal for ‘Extremism Disruption Orders’
could see courts banning speech that’s judged to be a bit too free.George Osborne has described this new tool as
a means to deal with those who don’t break any laws.Yes, he did.We can’t have folk running around doing stuff that’s legal.

You could of course join Labour.Where you’ll find Jack Straw arguing that Scotland’s ‘No’
vote justifies a declaration that separatism is now unconstitutional.He hasn’t explicitly said he’d like to ban
the SNP but that’s the direction of thought.Fortunately, it’s not the direction of Scottish politics.

Won’t the European Convention on Human Rights come to our defence?No.Article
10 (freedom of expression) is “subject tosuch
formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and
are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security,
territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or
crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the
reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information
received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of
the judiciary.”There’s not a lot
left once you’ve deducted all that.Note
that ‘the interests of territorial integrity’ are more important than freedom
of expression.Jack Straw couldn’t have
put it better.

As Joseph Stalin did put it, ideas are more powerful than
guns; we would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have
ideas?In Wessex, we’re used to seeing things
being banned and we’ll be ready.